Buy a Blog Post

Posted on 2025-05-29

I just read this interesting comment about getting paid for open source. I had a short conversation with the author.

That lead to this lovely bit of text:

When purchasing a license subscription, you are optionally encouraged to enter your GitHub username; this makes it easier for me to identify issues created by users with license subscriptions on the Komorebi GitHub repo.

I like the incentive there, pay to get priority.

So here’s an experiment. I’ll write a list of topics I’ve been meaning to turn into blog posts, and a price, and you, oh well-funded reader, can bribe me to finish them.

What happens when the money arrives? I’ll immediately dump a raw unedited blog post with the description and resources I’ve already collected, and then clean up the post.

I reserve the right to change prices after writing any of these blog posts. As time passes I may grow more or less interested in a topic.

• A survey of cool tools built on top of tree sitter’s concrete syntax trees. ( $15 )
• if your tests are hard to write, your API needs improvements, or test driven development is a great way to sanity check your APIs. ( $15 )
• the state of affordable input devices for pose tracking (aka, what happened to the Microsoft Kinect?) ( $50 )
  • how pose tracking turns sensor input into human body / hand positions ( $ 500 )
    • pose tracking software for analyzing and teaching martial arts ( $50000 )
• puzzles for learning
  • Lockhart’s Lament, or why you should keep a mental collection of small fun puzzles. ( $10 )
  • Some of the fun mental puzzles I’ve discovered after reading Lockhart’s Lament ( $30 )
  • The beauty of Brayden Cassella’s non-terminating beggar-my-neighbor, how someone solved one of my collection of fun puzzles, and why it’s now even more fun. ( $15 )
• Why I believe all programmers should read the Hamming book, Art & Fear, SICP, and The Pragmatic Programmer. ( $25 )
• How I did my taxes in emacs’ org-mode spreadsheets ( $20 )
  • what the accountant thought about me doing my taxes in emacs ( TBD )
• A cost comparison of StarLink vs fiber links, where the cost is price per bit over the lifetime of both. ( $50 )
• A summary of some papers on the effect of carbon dioxide levels on human cognition ( $35 )
  • Is it possible our society has become stupider due to rising global levels of carbon dioxide? ( $30 )
• conversations with correctness, why I believe incremental interactive ‘proof assistant’ tools such as GHCi, idris, and wingman are superior to large language models for exploratory programming ( $40 )
• An analysis of time to converge on maximum coverage for various property based testing frameworks in Haskell. ( $40 ) This is an extension of my ICFP lightning talk and earlier blog post.
• A description of “library sommeliers” that I pitched to the Haskell Foundation ( $25 )
  • A prototype “library sommelier” template with working demos ( $75 )
    • A language agnostic website for library sommeliers ( $75000 )
• notes on a working spoken programming language that uses Hindley-Milner type inference to decide what part of speech is being spoken now. ( $15 )
• Can you discover an unknown element by predicting and analyzing emission spectra from distant stars? Notes from a discussion on the Recurse Center zulip. ( $30 )

This is about a third of the full list, and includes posts I would immediately feel comfortable writing.

I will happily discuss suggestions, send me a message!

That’ll get priority over anything else, I am most productive when working with someone else on a task.

Sure? I’m also fine if you want to be anonymous.

Mostly by how much I want to write each thing. Small price means I want to do it, and think it’s easy enough. Ok, maybe I just made up all the prices anyway.

🤔 This could also be an excuse to re-organize my scattered lists of ideas, and find people who want to collaborate.

Post your own “blog post stub” list on your own blog, and SEND ME A LINK!